Read it.

As Rush Limbaugh pointed out during his show yesterday, the Democrat leaders were expecting Trump to react as a Usual Politician to their gaining control of the House in the recent election, which is to be humbled and to seek to ingratiate himself with his new masters. This was, after all, what Clinton did after Republicans handed him his ass during the mid-terms when they regained control of the House for the first time in decades.

But they had forgotten whom they were dealing with. Trump the Master Showman promptly reminded them that when it comes to framing an issue for public consumption he sets the standard.

Steve Sailer looks at the science.

As I’ve been mentioning for years, we live in an age of growing antiquarianism in terms of thinking about cause and effect of social outcomes. When I was young, there was much interest in how things had changed from the 1960s onward. The Sixties were seen as a big deal.

But now, leading historical savants like Ta-Nehisi Coates act as if they have been living in an underground fallout shelter since 1959. They’ve never heard of the Sixties. What possible influence could the last 50 years have on the present? If you want to understand the Obama Era you need to obsess over New Deal redlining.

The enthusiasm for epigenetics — i.e., a Lamarckian/Lysenkoist theory that the past, especially politically exploitable traumas such as the Holocaust or slavery, can damage genes for multiple generations — is related to this antiquarian turn,

You will have noticed this ‘antiquarian turn’ in public statements by those on the Left. When Newt Gingrich mentions orphanages, Hillary Clinton talks like there haven’t been any changes since Dickens. When the Left talks about slavery, you’d think that the Emancipation Proclamation was just last week.

Read it.

People of Color behaving badly — what are the odds?

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Funny how that works.

Some Democrats Uncomfortable With Trump Impeachment Talk

The top 15 Christmas cracker jokes of 2018, including gags about Trump, Theresa May and Meghan Markle

Presidential Historian Predicts Trump Will Resign From Office I’m sure he predicted Hillary’s win, too.,

Pelosi, Schumer Ask Trump To Take Talks Away From Cameras — Trump Refuses  The swine!

Report: Pelosi Said Meeting With Trump Was Like Getting Peed On By A Skunk  She didn’t say she minded.

Pelosi Says Trump Wants Shutdown As ‘Christmas Present’ — Corrects Herself To ‘Holiday Present’

Report: Pelosi Questions Trump’s ‘Manhood’ After Bitter Oval Office Meeting

Trump Flunks Shutdown 101  And of course Rich Lowry has managed tons of them.

Trump meeting with Pelosi and Schumer descends into chaos as president threatens to shut government over border  Yeah, four white politicians sitting in a circle sure sounds like ‘chaos’ to me.

Nancy Pelosi questions Donald Trump’s ‘manhood’ after chaotic White House meeting

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Kevin Williamson welcomes us to his day.

Eric Levitz of New York magazine has written a long-ish post that is mostly about my political views, which he gets mostly wrong. This is not entirely his fault. Levitz operates under two heavy disabilities: The first is that he’s stupid, and the second is that he’s dishonest. Paul Krugman seems to have put in a lot of work in his transition from respected economist to trifling partisan rage-monkey, but Levitz seems to have been born dumber than a catfish. So it’s only his dishonesty I’ll fault him for.

And he doesn’t mean that in a bad way….

Read it.

Someone came up with the label “virtue signaling” to describe the psychological impulse behind these signs. The idea is that people who put them up want to tell you how noble they are. But that doesn’t sound right. Virtue-signalers aren’t in any way in doubt about their own virtue. What they really want to do is signal how depraved others are.

It’s about vice signaling, not virtue signaling.

This is the same impulse behind the prevalence of the Aggregation Fallacy in moralizing journalism. Whenever a proglodyte writer wrings ix hands over a situation and uses the words ‘we’ or ‘us’, ix is not really including ix in that collective, because obviously ix is sufficiently woke to See The Dystopian Reality; what is actually meant is ‘you’.

A couple of years back there used to be Fourth of July street picnics there. But the shindigs haven’t happened the last couple of years, and I don’t think I’ll see them again soon. Vice signaling breaks up communities, and there’s a lot of it today.

Yup. The SJW witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners doesn’t allow for rubbing elbows with the enemy.

Vice signaling is a defense mechanism, meant to displace liberal guilt. There was a moment, shortly after the 2016 election, when liberals realized that ordinary Americans had turned against them, and that they had reason to do so.

Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.

Read it.

Google has revealed ambitious plans to redevelop its hometown of Mountain View following a major land grab in California.

The technology giant submitted a development proposal to the city on Friday, titled ‘A Shared Vision for North Bayshore’, which describes Google’s vision to transform the neighbourhood “from a place for cars to a place for people.”

The plans include new office space, affordable housing, bike and foot paths, as well as provisions for climate change events predicted over the next century.

Google’s proposal explains: “Protecting development and infrastructure against projected sea-level rise in the year 2100, with development generally located in upland areas; expanding the Charleston Retention Basin by over 2 acres to provide an additional 5 acre-feet of stormwater detention volume during larger storm events; and exploring a series of both public and private partnerships to plan for and fund regional level strategies to address sea-level rise (and associated climate risks).”

Cue weird music from a Brave New World science fiction utopia movie. Think of the volcano caldera from Our Man Flint.

David Cole scopes it out.

As a weapon of leftist ideology enforcement, deplatforming is proving to be strikingly effective, because it accomplishes two things: It removes opposing viewpoints from the marketplace (if one team can’t get to the playing field, the other team wins by default), and it scares potential dissenters into silence, forcing them to self-censor so as not to lose their online presence. Deplatforming is how the left is taking its bubble, that safe terrarium occupied by Hollywood elites and mainstream journalists in which opposing views are out of sight and mind (the “rather special world” lovingly spoken of by the late Pauline Kael), and making it everyone’s bubble.

Trump faces ‘very real prospect of jail time,’ following Cohen revelations, leading Democrat claims  Schiff again.

Trump presidency must end with ‘landslide’ defeat in 2020, James Comey says in strongest attack yet  Well, he can hope,.

At least 14 Trump associates spoke to Russians during campaign and transition now subject to Mueller investigation  Too bad Speaking To Russians isn’t a crime.

Trump-Mueller investigation – LIVE: President warned of impeachment and jail time as probe escalates after explosive court filings  These guys sure talk a good fight.

‘Morning Joe’ Says Trump’s Collusion Claims Show He’s ‘Lost His Mind’ Or Is Completely ‘Stupid’  Gee, I was about to say the same about Scarborough.

Nonpartisan Unbiased Lifelong Republican Reverend Jim Comey: We Have To Use “Every Breath We Have” To Push Trump Out of Office

White House in chaos as Trump scrambles to fill chief of staff position  Don’t they wish. Trump will get a new chief of staff and the ‘chaos’ will reveal itself as wishful thinking.

Will the White House have no Chief of Staff?  Women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc.

Why has late night swapped laughs for lusting after Mueller?

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame them.

Plenty of room in Texas.

Check it out.

The Squatty Potty is pretty simple. It’s designed so that your body is better configured for pooping. You’ll poop faster and easier and your colon will thank you for it. The reduced straining can help heal hemorrhoids and prevent other issues in that neck of the woods. This can also be used as a toilet training aid for toddlers.

Read it.

Guess I need to check out their menu more often.

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We got your diversity, right here.

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But you knew that.

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Reading the headlines this week is like taking a trip to an alternate universe. Ten years ago, if you’d have said that in 2018 teachers would get fired for calling a girl a girl, most people wouldn’t have believed you. Unfortunately, that’s the ridiculous world Americans are waking up to every morning. But to most people’s relief, not everyone is playing along with this charade. And that includes President Donald Trump.

Read it.

But, presumably, not ‘far-left’ ones.

Evidently, the ‘far-right’ (i.e. anybody to the right of Barack Obama) will need to create their own ‘crowdfunding’ sites in addition to their own online social networks.

The new civil war appears to be on.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

I’m wondering how they determined that it was ‘cultural appropriation’ rather than mockery?

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Perhaps it has something to do with the hordes of ankle-biters bitching and moaning about it.

Perhaps.

Most people who write about rich people aren’t rich themselves, and so have no idea how rich people think; the best they can do is to imagine how they would think if they themselves were rich. It usually starts out with the observation that ‘certain people have more than they could ever hope to spend’, and wends it’s way into fantasy-land from there.

The point of being rich isn’t to spend, although it does allow you to spend, sometimes lavishly; the point of being rich is that it allows you to invest. Rich people don’t put their money in a big checking account waiting for the bills from Cartier and Armani to come in — their money is invested, and rich people spend a lot of their time managing those investments.  That’s how they got rich to begin with and that’s how they stay rich.

If you want to know how people who merely think of money in terms of what it can be spent on, just Google for ‘lottery winner’ and read some of the sad-sack stories. These aren’t rich people; they’re poor people with money. The difference between the two is what most article-writers never comprehend.

Two Former Obama Aides Are Certain Mueller Can Prove Russian ‘Collusion’  I suspect that they were sure Hillary was going to win, too,

Saturday Night Live: Robert De Niro makes surprise SNL appearance as Mueller in cold open  I guess it’s more important to bash Trump than to actually be funny.

Ted Danson interview: ‘Election night 2016 was a slow-motion car wreck’  Yat Another Whining Anti-Trumper.

Trump administration departure list: Everyone who has been fired by Trump or quit since he took office  Something that, so far as I am aware, has never been done for any previous President. I wonder what a corresponding list for Obama would look like? We won’t see one in the DemLegHump Media.

Nadler Floats Impeachment, Says New Mueller Revelations Could Justify Removing Trump  Yeah, that’s news.

Schiff Says Trump May ‘Face The Very Real Prospect Of Jail Time’  Depending on what they can ‘trump’ up, of course.

‘Siege warfare’: Republican anxiety spikes as Trump faces growing legal and political perils  Well, unless they come up with an actual crime, it’s not going to be a problem.

We Watch CNN’s Terrible Media Show So You Don’t Have To

Trump Family Is Worse Than Al Capone’s Criminal Empire, Says Democratic Rep Steve Cohen  Seriously deranged.

Scott Adams:

The President or somebody did something that wasn’t a crime but it was very close to one you could imagine could be illegal if things like that were illegal … but it feels like sorta close to something that if the situation were different and some of the variables were opposite such as if he was President or there was a quid-pro-quo….

 

Read it.

The French are pretty serious about riots.

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• The former CNN contributor and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill was fired from the network on Nov. 29 for comments he made about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
• Hill said Palestinians should be able to use violence to defend themselves against Israel and invoked the term “From the river to the sea.”
• Calls for Temple to terminate his teaching contract continue to grow, and supporters and protesters have clashed over what to do next as Hill maintains he’s not an anti-Semite.

Read it.

As one might expect from an article published in a Voice of the Crust like the New Yorker, the main premise is that these wonderful kids were okay in their day but now they’ve ‘grown up’ to realize that Government Is Good and Individualism Is Defective.

Certain elements of the “Whole Earth Catalog” haven’t aged particularly well: the pioneer rhetoric, the celebration of individualism, the disdain for government and social institutions, the elision of power structures, the hubris of youth.

…

Brand now describes himself as “post-libertarian,” a shift he attributes to a brief stint working with Jerry Brown, during his first term as California’s governor, in the nineteen-seventies, and to books like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” which describes the Trump Administration’s damage to vital federal agencies.

…

“We didn’t know what government did. The whole government apparatus is quite wonderful, and quite crucial. [It] makes me frantic, that it’s being taken away.”

This points up, I think, the danger that exists for so-called ‘libertarians’ who are at heart ideologues and temperamentally more at home with other ideologues, even those of a contrary viewpoint, than with anti-ideologues who want to see ideology constrained to maximize freedom. Like electrons, once they lose their excitement and come to a rest state, the rest state they come to is with the ideology that rules the Establishment.

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline looks for the there, there.

“Prosecutors’ Narrative Is Clear: Trump Defrauded Voters.” So declares the first part of the headline of a New York Times article by Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos. The rest of the headline asks “But What Does It Mean?”

Good question. It may mean that the prosecutors haven’t found a crime, but are still pissed off that Trump won the election.

Read it.

Researchers have used a neural network to generate artificial fingerprints that work as a “master key” for biometric identification systems and prove fake fingerprints can be created.

According to a paper presented at a security conference in Los Angeles, the artificially generated fingerprints, dubbed “DeepMasterPrints” by the researchers from New York University, were able to imitate more than one in five fingerprints in a biometric system that should only have an error rate of one in a thousand.

How soon before they can do that with retinas?

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

I have always marveled at the weight given to fingerprint identification, although so far as I am aware there is no real science behind it.

Read it.

The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others.

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which included language that we warned would provide implied Congressional endorsement to biometric screening of domestic travelers and U.S. citizens, became law in early October. The ink wasn’t even dry on that bill when the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published their Biometrics Roadmap for Aviation Security and the Passenger Experience, detailing TSA’s plans to work with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to roll out increased biometric collection and screening for all passengers, including Americans traveling domestically.

This roadmap appears to latch on to a perceived acceptance of biometrics as security keys while ignoring the pervasive challenges with accurately identifying individuals and the privacy risks associated with collecting massive amounts of biometric data. Furthermore, it provides no strategy for dealing with passengers who are unfairly misidentified.

Worst of all, while the roadmap explicitly mentions collaborating with airlines and other partners inside and outside the government, it is alarmingly silent on how TSA plans to protect a widely distributed honeypot of sensitive biometric information ripe for misuse by identity thieves, malicious actors, or even legitimate employees abusing their access privileges.

Media Misses: Reporters Make Bush’s Funeral About Trump

Trump makes Benedict Arnold look like a patriot  Standard anti-Trump hit piece, taking every allegation as fact, every possibility as proven, and salting heavily with smears. You wonder how shit like this even gets published.

Read it.

This could be frustrated by shops putting cashpoints in the back of the shop, but for some reason they always put them up front where it’s easy to extract. Ah, well.

Read it.

That would explain the Kennedys.

Too bad qualification for office can’t be inherited as well.

Read it.

But you have to remember that Notorious Racist Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Probably not. But we could do a lot worse.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Note to self: Avoid nightclubs.

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Professor O’Mullane said the new composite material he and PhD student Ummul Sultana had developed enabled electrochemical water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen using cheap and readily available elements as catalysts.

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Well, you know, Princeton — what do you expect from a place that would hire the likes of Paul Krugman?

This is why Ms. Wollstein’s parents are paying $62,750 a year (including room and board) to send her to Princeton, so that she can vent her anti-heterosexual hostility and prevent the performance of Disney songs on campus.

I doubt seriously that her parents are paying that. More likely she is getting some kind of financial aid and loans.

I suspect that in many such cases if the parents were paying full freight these kids would be an community college or in the military. And the parents are delighted, of course, that their daughter managed to get into Princeton; I doubt that she comes from a long line of Princetonians. She demonstrates the usual narcissism of someone who has come to the Other Left Coast from Flyover Country and is determined to Make It Big and enter the Establishment.

Read it.

The ‘former Nixon White House lawyer’ in question is John Dean, famous teller of tall tales, but of course they can’t put that in the headline or everyone would say ‘oh, him’ and fail to read the article.

Evidence from Donald Trump’s former lawyer about Russian collusion with his presidential campaign team could lead to his impeachment, Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel has claimed.

Note the weasel-word ‘could’. As with ‘climate change’, this is how progs get around the fact that (a) there is no evidence (but there ‘could’ be!) that Trump is connected with any of Cohen’s shenanigans, or that (b) ‘collusion’ is not a crime, however much prog handwringing it triggers.

Mr Dean told CNN that the US Congress had enough evidence to impeach the US leader.

But that evidence isn’t cited or specified, of course. The point is to make the statement, not back it up. ‘See! See! John Dean says there’s enough evidence for impeachment, and he ought to know!’

What John Dean certainly knows is that CNN isn’t going to give him the publicity he craves if he says ‘No there there.’

The Other McCain does some digging.

One of the dishonest rhetorical tricks that liberals have recently played is to substitute “white supremacy” for “racism” as an accusation with which to smear conservatives. You might imagine we were living through a neo-Nazi revival, the way liberals keep finding “white supremacy” lurking everywhere. The use of this scary term, which conjures up images of goose-stepping Nazis and cross-burning Klansmen, became necessary after groups like the SPLC discovered that merely calling someone a “racist” had become ineffective. Liberals have so overused “racist” as to deprive it of any meaning other than “a white person I don’t like.” If you spend much time analyzing political rhetoric, you realize why liberals developed this habit of name-calling. Because they advocate policies that won’t work or which taxpayers can’t afford (the U.S. government is already $20 trillion in debt), liberals must engage in deception to gain support. Identity politics is once such deception: Claim that a policy will benefit a particular group that is disadvantaged or oppressed, and then accuse opponents of the policy of “hate” against the group.

Theodore Dalrymple misses the Good Old Days.

If you try to be fair, you have to institute methods of being so; moreover, you have not only to be fair, but to be seen to be fair, for fairness, at least in the selection of people for employment, is a quality that cannot be a light that is hidden under a bushel.

Now, in order to be fair, the method must be formalized and not open to the influence of personal prejudice or connection. In practice, this means forms and questions whose answers have an agreed weight ascribed to them in advance. And this in turn means that the person selected will be the person who knows best how to fill forms and answer questions according to the most desired answers. This is not the way to find people of great ability. It is the way to find people of petty personal ambition.

Read it.

California already has a problem with insufficient new homes being built to satisfy demand, and high housing prices exacerbating population outflow and homelessness. This will just make that situation worse. But I guess they don’t care.

Read it.

I should think so.

Politico: Of Course Bush’s Funeral Was All About Trump. Everything With Us Shriveled DC Obsessives Is Always About Trump. He Gives Purpose to Our Empty Useless Lives.

MSNBC Host Criticized The Way Trump Held His Arms At Bush Funeral

Media Exploits Bush’s Death to Express Their Hatred of Trump

The Media Put Bush, McCain On Pedestals After Their Deaths To Attack Trump

Racist Don Lemon: Trump’s Hypocrisy Is Stunning

Colbert Says an Innocent Homage to George Bush Sounded Like Trump-Bashing  He was probably right.

Seth Meyers Says The President Would Rat On His Own Family To Escape Jail Time  Pure bile. He has no way of knowing that, and there is nothing in Trump’s history to suggest that it might be true.

CNN Anchor Attempts To Bait Muslim Republican Into Bashing Trump

Atlantic Writer Feels ‘Mudbound’-Level Anger When Trumps, Obamas Shook Hands At Bush Funeral

Charges Dropped Against George Lopez For Bizarre Anti-Trump Hooters Brawl

Ocasio-Cortez Warns Donald Trump Jr. She Could Subpoena Him  So young, and already a totalitarian.

Read it.

Just before Halloween, the U.S. streaming giant Hulu sent out a tweet: “If you’re dressing up for #Huluween this year, this is your reminder to wear a costume that is culturally appropriate and respectful to others. Let’s celebrate the holiday in a way that we can all enjoy.”

The question of whether some Halloween costumes are “appropriate” is one of the hottest flashpoints in the culture wars right now. The mainstream media, university professors and left-wing politicians seem to agree that dressing up as people of another race is inherently offensive while a large proportion of regular people believe that costumes are only offensive if there’s an intent to mock. Unsurprisingly, Hulu’s finger-wagging tweet pissed off a lot of people who wondered why a streaming service was suddenly sounding like a social justice warrior. Hulu deleted the tweet.

The problem is that companies are filling up with snowflakes who have been trained to political correctness since their childhoods, and who think of this sort of ThoughtControl as a perfectly natural thing for a social organization like a company — it wouldn’t occur to them that there is a difference between a business and some sort of club — to do.

That is even ignoring pseudo-businesses like Ben & Jerries whose business model is catering to the special snowflake crowd and depending on charging hipster prices for a virtue-signaling vehicle.

Sammut points out that the corporate virtue-signaling almost exclusively tends to favor the political tastes of the “elites” over the “ordinary” people, and that’s what makes it so dangerous. When Hulu tweets about being “culturally appropriate” at Halloween, it’s affirming values primarily held by rich urban-dwellers in California and New York, while attacking the values of white rural voters who overwhelming elected U.S. President Donald Trump or voted for Brexit.

Again, it’s largely a matter of corporations taking their managerial leadership from Children of the Crust who are more and more products of the Marxist March Through The Institutions and who see absolutely nothing wrong with promoting rigid conformity with proglodyte nostrums. The rabid GoodThink promoted in Silicon Valley is just a sign that things have progressed farther there than elsewhere. In that sense, California is truly ‘ahead’ of the rest of the nation.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.